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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Resolving the Edge of a Quantum Pyramid

arXiv:2606.14698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standing on the shoulders of giants, we resolve the quantum pyramids conjecture, confirming the globally information-optimal measurement for an ensemble of equiangular equiprobable pure states, as conjectured by Englert and \v{R}eháček (arXiv:0905.0510). We do so by proving the remaining entropy inequalities of Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2506.06700), which certify optimality for obtuse and flat pyramids. For obtuse pyramids, our key contribution is a rigorous proof that local minimizers of the corresponding entropy inequality cannot have three distinct coordinate values. We show that eliminating this family can be reduced to a neat algebraic reciprocal inequality relating branches of the Lambert $W$ function, which may be of independent interest. For flat pyramids, we prove a tight $\ell^p$ inequality for zero-sum vectors that was recently conjectured, proved analytically in dimension $d=3$, and computationally verified for $d\leq 200$ by Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2603.24017). We prove this bound for all $d\geq 2$ via a technique in symmetric inequalities known as the equal variables method.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Med-R2: Perception and Reflection-driven Complex Reasoning for Medical Report Generation

Automated medical report generation (MRG) is increasingly used to reduce the burden of manual reporting and for decision support. Large vision-language models (LVLMs) hold great promise for automated MRG due to their fine-grained image-text alignment and advanced text-generation capabilities. Currently, state-of-the-art MRGs primarily focus on adapting pre-trained LVLMs with direct supervised fine-tuning (SFT), a fine-tuning strategy with medical image-report pairs. However, several factors limit the performance of these LVLMs. Firstly, direct SFT enables LVLMs to generate medical reports directly without an intermediate thinking process of pathological feature perception and diagnostic reasoning. This causes a potential failure to perceive pathological features and thus leads to misdiagnosis. Secondly, direct SFT lacks the incorporation of radiology-specific knowledge guidance, causing LVLMs to misinterpret perceived pathological features and make incorrect diagnoses. To address these gaps, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy named Med-R2. We introduce a perception-driven long reasoning process that precedes report generation and incorporates radiology-specific knowledge as guidance. Additionally, to alleviate potential perceptual errors in complex reasoning, a reflection mechanism is introduced to refine the perception of pathological features and the generated report. Our experiments demonstrate that Med-R2 effectively enhances the capability of pathological features perception and diagnosis accuracy for MRG via fine-tuned LVLMs.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Mean-field limits for stochastic particle systems on dense graphs

arXiv:2606.11369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic interacting particle systems whose interaction structure is described by dense weighted directed graphs converging to a graphon. In the thermodynamic limit, we prove a law of large numbers for the empirical measure process and derive a deterministic nonlinear master equation describing the macroscopic evolution. The limiting equation retains the heterogeneous interaction structure of the microscopic system through the limiting graphon, allowing for spatially non-homogeneous behaviors such as localized or community-type interactions.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Boltzmann Attention: Learnable Ising Couplings for Cooperative Attention

arXiv:2606.12478v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Attention mechanisms are central to modern sequence models, yet standard attention computes relevance primarily through individual query–key similarities. Although softmax normalization introduces competition among positions, a standard attention layer does not explicitly parameterize learnable interactions between attention decisions. This limits its ability to directly model cooperative or antagonistic co-attention structure within the attention mechanism itself. We propose Boltzmann attention, an energy-based generalization in which attention patterns are governed by an interacting Ising model. The method augments the usual data-dependent local fields with learnable pairwise couplings, allowing the model to represent inter-position correlations beyond those captured by softmax or sigmoid attention. Experiments on character-level language modeling and synthetic bracket matching show that Boltzmann attention consistently improves over standard softmax attention within a standard Transformer architecture, with the advantage becoming more pronounced as sequence length increases. A four-way ablation confirms that the improvement arises from the learnable pairwise couplings. These results suggest that explicit inter-position interactions provide a principled enhancement for attention-based sequence modeling. Moreover, the Ising formulation opens a natural path toward quantum-computing-based sampling strategies: we demonstrate that diabatic quantum annealing provides a practical training method while maintaining competitive performance with exact Boltzmann computation.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Rethinking RAG in Long Videos: What to Retrieve and How to Use It?

arXiv:2606.13141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation is moving beyond text into long, egocentric video, where systems must select query-relevant chunks across multiple modalities and temporal granularities. Yet progress in VideoRAG is limited by two gaps: existing benchmarks allow queries to be answered without the video, obscuring retrieval errors, and prior methods apply a single modality-granularity configuration per query, ignoring chunk-level variability. We address both by introducing V-RAGBench, a benchmark of $\langle$query, evidence chunk, answer$\rangle$ triplets that enables faithful, decoupled evaluation of retrieval and generation, and CARVE, a simple method that runs parallel retrievers across configurations and employs chunk-adaptive reranking to identify the winning configuration for each chunk. Each chunk then enters the generator under its winning configuration selected during retrieval, yielding an interleaved evidence form where the chunk-level decision propagates across both stages. CARVE outperforms eight recent VideoRAG baselines, with the chunks supplied to the generator interleaving multiple configurations rather than sharing a single one, a behavior unattainable by query-level methods.

06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

RUB: Evaluating Residual Knowledge in Unlearned Models

Machine Unlearning (MUL) has emerged as a key mechanism for privacy protection and content regulation, yet current techniques often fail to guarantee the complete removal of sensitive information. While most existing works focus on verifying the execution of unlearning, they overlook the critical question of whether models remain robust against adversarial attempts to recover forgotten knowledge. In this work, we advocate for the principle of Robust Unlearning, which requires models to be both indistinguishable from retrained counterparts and resilient against diverse adversarial threats. To instantiate this principle, we propose a unified benchmark, RUB (Robust Unlearning Benchmark), that systematically evaluates the robustness of unlearning algorithms across classification, image-to-image reconstruction, and text-to-image synthesis. Within this framework, we introduce the Unlearning Mapping Attack (UMA) as a generalizable method to detect residual information, and demonstrate how existing attack strategies can be adapted into this framework as long as they conform to the generic UMA framework. Our experiments across discriminative and generative tasks reveal that state-of-the-art unlearning methods remain vulnerable under these evaluations, even when passing standard verification metrics. By positioning robustness as the central criterion and providing a benchmark for adversarial evaluation, we hope RUB paves the way toward more reliable and secure unlearning practices. The codebase and model checkpoints in RUB will be published.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

G2IA: Geometry-Guided Instance-Aware Retrieval and Refinement for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

Cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) enables camera-only robots to localize against pre-built LiDAR maps in autonomous navigation scenarios. This image-to-point-cloud setting is challenged by two coupled ambiguities: the modality gap between perspective RGB appearance and sparse metric geometry, and perceptual aliasing among urban places with similar roads, facades, intersections, and object arrangements. Instead of treating CMPR as a single global descriptor matching problem, we argue that reliable retrieval requires both geometry-aware representation alignment and fine-grained candidate verification. In this paper, we propose G2IA, a geometry-guided instance-aware framework for image-to-point-cloud place recognition. In the retrieval stage, visual geometry priors from VGGT and instance features are integrated to construct place descriptors that are more compatible with LiDAR-derived map representations. In the refinement stage, the retrieved candidates are re-ranked by explicitly verifying whether local instance shapes and their relative spatial layouts are consistent across modalities. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that G2IA consistently improves image-to-point-cloud place recognition under different localization thresholds, and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Online Reward-Punishment Learning from Fixed-Channel Perceptual Event Streams without Environment Rewards

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study online reward-punishment learning when the environment provides no scalar reward or evaluative label. At each step the agent receives only a fixed-channel perceptual packet, and quantities such as pain, energy, contact, damage, or cognitive error are treated as perceptual dimensions whose valence must be inferred from transition consequences. OHIRL separates four roles: M_psi learns next-packet prediction, D_omega models residual dynamics, C_eta is a fixed internal post-transition trajectory evaluator, and B_xi learns to use the resulting value evidence for later policy updates and action scoring. C_eta uses a recovery-positive and persistence/growth-negative residual-regulation orientation; a coefficient-origin audit shows that equal-unit, raw-equal, and random monotone variants preserve more than 92% of the released top-action rankings, while sign inversion preserves 0%. The reward-free protocol exposes observation transitions while withholding environment rewards, delayed external evaluators, success labels, and action-goodness labels. A conditional error decomposition separates B_xi evidence-estimation error from residual policy-optimization error. In a 2x2-XOR packet task, medicine and chili acquire opposite value under visual XOR contexts, and the same pain or spice increase can be positive or negative depending on consequence structure; B_xi reaches 0.952 balanced reward-sign accuracy. In a full online-interleaved audit, M_psi reaches holdout R2=0.907, B_xi reaches 0.940 sign accuracy, and the policy reaches 0.979 optimal-action accuracy, while immediate packet scores, prediction-error rewards, shuffled targets, zero reward, and error-reduction controls collapse. Hidden-reward CartPole and Taxi controls, public-context no-leakage audits, and module-role ablations further test information boundaries and component necessity.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Instabilities in a Non-KAM System via Information Scrambling: A Note

arXiv:2606.12761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study operator growth in quantized non-KAM systems using out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), focusing on the kicked harmonic oscillator as a representative example. Since the classical harmonic oscillator is degenerate, the dynamics fall outside the usual Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) framework, and resonances play a central role in shaping the phase space. We examine the system near resonances, where the ratio between the oscillator and driving frequencies takes integer values. Even though the classical Lyapunov exponent remains small at these points, and hence no conventional chaos, the phase space still undergoes strong structural changes. The OTOCs are particularly sensitive to these resonances, with a quadratic-in-time growth at resonance compared to linear growth away from it. Within a perturbative treatment, we derive closed-form expressions for the OTOCs and uncover a number-theoretic structure emerging in the behavior of OTOCs, governed by the Euler totient function of the frequency ratio. Overall, the results we present in this short note imply that resonant structures can play an important role in controlling information spreading.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LSTM-Based Detection of Structural Breaks in Property Insurance Loss Reserving: A Climate-Informed Approach

arXiv:2606.11463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate loss reserving is foundational to insurer solvency, yet accelerating climate driven catastrophes systematically violate the stability assumptions on which traditional actuarial methods depend. This white paper presents a research program testing whether Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks can detect and adapt to these structural breaks faster and more accurately than Chain Ladder, Bornhuetter Ferguson, and Cape Cod methods. Using 15 plus years of regulatory development triangle data from Florida and Louisiana, enriched with NOAA hurricane intensity indices and sea surface temperatures, we hypothesize a targeted improvement of 15, 20% in reserve accuracy for catastrophe exposed years, a threshold grounded both in the prior neural network reserving literature and in the formal convergence results developed here. Beyond empirical validation, we develop a theoretical framework grounding LSTM structural break detection in probabilistic terms, providing formal performance guarantees that compensate for the limited number of catastrophe events in the test period. We document the research design, methodology, expected contributions, and a candid assessment of limitations.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Micro-macro population dynamics models of benthic algae with long-memory decay and generic growth

arXiv:2505.04289v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benthic algae as a primary producer in riverine ecosystems develop biofilms on the riverbed. Their population dynamics involve growth and decay processes, the former owing to the balance between biological proliferation and mortality, while the latter to mechanical abrasion because of the transport of sediment particles. Contrary to the assumptions of previous studies, the decay has experimentally been found to exhibit long-memory behavior, where the population decreases at an algebraic rate. However, the origin and mathematical theory of this phenomenon remain unresolved. The objective of this study is to introduce a novel mathematical model employing spin processes to describe microscopic biofilm dynamics. A spin process is a continuous-time jump process transitioning between states 0 and 1, and the continuum limit of these processes captures the long-memory decay and generates generic growth. The proposed framework leverages heterogeneous spin rates, achieved by appropriately superposing spin processes with distinct rates, to reproduce the long-memory decay. Computational simulations demonstrate the behavior of the model, particularly emphasizing rate-induced tipping phenomena. This mathematical model provides a computationally tractable interpretation of benthic algae dynamics and their long-term prediction, relevant to river-engineering applications.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Cascade Classification of Dermoscopic Images of Skin Neoplasms with Controllable Sensitivity and External Clinical Validation

Purpose. To compare deep learning architectures and classification schemes for dermoscopic images of skin neoplasms and assess their generalization on transfer from open international datasets to independent clinical datasets of Russian practice. Methods. Four architectures (ViT-B/16, Swin-S, ConvNeXt-S, EfficientNetV2-S) were compared in three schemes: binary (malignant/benign), single-stage four-class (benign, MEL, SCC, BCC), and a two-stage cascade (binary triage, then three-class differentiation MEL/SCC/BCC). All models used ImageNet-pretrained weights and a single augmentation protocol on aggregated open ISIC Archive data, and were evaluated on an internal held-out sample and two clinical datasets (Melanoscope AI mobile system; Sechenov University). Results. Internally the binary stage attains ROC-AUC 0.952-0.966; on Sechenov University it drops to 0.797-0.893, sensitivity to 0.53-0.67, and ECE rises from 0.02 to 0.27-0.39 with underestimation of malignancy, quantifying a generalization gap in ranking and calibration. Paired tests confirm one inter-architecture result on clinical data: the deficit of ViT-B/16 at the binary stage (p

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Harness In-Context Operator Learning with Chain of Operators

arXiv:2606.12318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators approximate mappings between function spaces, but often generalize poorly to other operators and usually require fine-tuning or retraining. In-Context Operator Networks (ICON) addresses this issue by prompting the model with numerical context so that the model learns specific operators from prompts and adapt to different operators without fine-tuning. However, ICON may still fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) operator tasks. Inpired by the success of harness engineering of Large Language models (LLMs), we introduce Chain of Operators (CHOP), a framework that harness a frozen ICON to OOD operator tasks without updating its parameters. Specifically, CHOP constructs a chain of operators consisting of explicit elementary transformations and the frozen ICON. Experiments on a scalar conservation law and a mean-field control problem show that CHOP reduces relative inference error over direct ICON evaluation, while each operator in the chain remains interpretable and in closed form. A chain constructed on one PDE family further generalizes to a different family, indicating shared mechanisms across harness systems.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Risk Decomposition Framework for Pre-Hoc Fine-Tuning Prediction

arXiv:2606.17649v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The high cost of fine-tuning LLMs poses a significant economic barrier; pre-hoc performance prediction offers a critical solution to substantially reduce this expense. However, the theoretical limits of pre-hoc performance prediction remain unexplored. We formulate it as a stochastic estimation problem under information constraints, decomposing prediction risk into two components: an intrinsic limit (static data-model compatibility) and a reducible optimization variance. We prove that optimization variance admits a necessary lower bound on its decay rate, implying fundamental constraints on how quickly uncertainty dissipates, regardless of the predictor used. Based on these dynamics, we derive a budget-optimal probing principle and introduce a predictability phase diagram that organizes tasks into three distinct regimes: Static-Sufficient, Dynamic-Critical, and Noise-Dominant. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate these theoretical regimes and demonstrate the efficiency of our probing strategy.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Poly-Social Risk for Hypertension Among Black and Latina Women

Background: Hypertension is a leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor prominently influenced by health-related social needs (HRSN). Whether detailed information on HRSN can improve identification of hypertension among minoritized women is unknown. Methods: Black and Latina women aged 18-65 years completed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Accountable Health Communities Screening Tool, assessing 13 HRSN domains. Hypertension was ascertained by a validated EHR-based algorithm or self-report of hypertension. Logistic regression tested associations of HRSN with hypertension. LASSO regression with 10-fold cross-validation was used to derive a poly-social risk score in the training set (random 70%) and tested in the validation set (30%) against a sociodemographic model (age, race, income, education). Results: Among 1302 participants (mean [SD] age 40.1 [11.3] years, 70.4% Black, 44.3% Latina), higher cumulative burden of HRSN was associated with increased odds of hypertension (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] for each additional domain of HRSN: 1.07 [95% CI 1.01-1.14], P=0.02). Food insecurity (aOR 2.30 [1.37-3.87], P= 0.002), lapse in utilities (aOR 1.44 [1.04-1.96], P=0.02), poor concentration (aOR 1.57 [1.13-2.17], P=0.007), and social isolation (aOR 1.77 [1.14-2.73], P=0.01) were associated with hypertension. In the validation set, the poly-social risk score did not improve discrimination for hypertension vs. the sociodemographic model (AUC 0.76 [95% CI 0.71-0.81] vs. AUC 0.80 [0.75-0.85]). Conclusion: In this cross-sectional analysis of Black and Latina women, greater cumulative social disadvantage was associated with hypertension. While inclusion of HRSN did not improve hypertension prediction beyond conventional sociodemographic indices, findings may inform targeted interventions among minorities at cardiometabolic risk.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Convex Route to Thermoelasticity: Learning Internal Energy and Dissipation

arXiv:2603.28707v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a physics-based neural network framework for the discovery of constitutive models in fully coupled thermomechanics. In contrast to classical formulations based on the Helmholtz energy, we adopt the internal energy and a dissipation potential as primary constitutive functions, expressed in terms of deformation and entropy. This choice avoids the need to enforce mixed convexity–concavity conditions and facilitates a consistent incorporation of thermodynamic principles. In this contribution, we focus on materials without preferred directions or internal variables. While the formulation is posed in terms of entropy, the temperature is treated as the independent observable, and the entropy is inferred internally through the constitutive relation, enabling thermodynamically consistent modeling without requiring entropy data. Thermodynamic admissibility of the networks is guaranteed by construction. The internal energy and dissipation potential are represented by input convex neural networks, ensuring convexity and compliance with the second law. Objectivity, material symmetry, and normalization are embedded directly into the architecture through invariant-based representations and zero-anchored formulations. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework on synthetic and experimental datasets, including purely thermal problems and fully coupled thermomechanical responses of soft tissues and filled rubbers. The results show that the learned models accurately capture the underlying constitutive behavior. All code, data, and trained models are made publicly available via https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19248596.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Attention by Synchronization in Coupled Oscillator Networks

arXiv:2606.12059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We address transformer attention on energy-constrained physical substrates. Softmax attention requires exponentiation and global reduction, operations with high energy cost on von Neumann hardware and no natural physical analog. We show that Kuramoto synchronization dynamics (which arise in electrical, mechanical, superconducting, and charge-density-wave oscillator arrays, among other physical systems) implement a well-defined attention operation without either. The resulting mechanism, fixed-query oscillator attention, replaces softmax's arithmetic with the equilibration of a gradient flow on the sphere: queries are learned anchors fixed on the sphere, and free oscillators evolve under Kuramoto-Lohe dynamics until they settle at positions encoding attention weights via cosine similarity. Because the computation is equilibration, it requires no exponentiation; the only global operation is an affine normalization at readout. The fixed point is provably unique and globally attractive from almost every initial condition, a guarantee that holds across every physical realization. Empirically, at the minimal hardware configuration (oscillator dimension $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2), oscillator attention outperforms softmax on keyword spotting (+1.00 pp) and on subject-verb agreement (+5.27 pp on hard sentences, with zero training failures versus one in five for softmax). On causal language modeling, where softmax retains an advantage, oscillator attention closes the gap as $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ grows: from +11.09 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2 to +2.98 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 32 on WikiText-2, and from +2.39 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2 to +0.57 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 32 on TinyStories. The main objective of this work is not to replace softmax in software but to provide a mathematically grounded blueprint for accurate attention on physical substrates.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum algorithm for Valiant-Vazirani reduction

arXiv:2606.18428v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: There is growing interest in extensions of the standard model of gate-based quantum computation to include auxiliary degrees of freedom evolving according to a nonlinear Schrödinger equation. By reducing the Boolean satisfiability problem SAT to quantum state discrimination, Abrams and Lloyd argued that the right type of nonlinearity can be used to solve NP and #P problems in polynomial time, at least in an idealized noise-free limit. For practical implementation, however, we are restricted to simulated and emergent nonlinearities, such as that appearing in mean field models for ultracold atoms and similar ensembles. A prominent example is the torsion model, which arises in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates and spin models with all-to-all Ising interaction. But torsion-based state discrimination appears to fall short of solving SAT. Here we close this gap by constructing the filtered oracle of the Valiant-Vazirani theorem, providing a randomized polynomial-time reduction from SAT to UNIQUE SAT, a promise problem where there is at most 1 satisfying assignment. In the noise-free limit, the UNIQUE SAT problem can be solved in polynomial time using torsion nonlinearity. Quantum Valiant-Vazirani reduction is no faster than the efficient classical version, but a fault-tolerant implementation coupled to a nonlinear quantum coprocessor simulating torsion would enable polynomial time solution to NP (but not #P) problems.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Intelligent Automation for Embodied Benchmark Construction: Pipelines, Embodiments, Simulators, and Trends

arXiv:2606.12207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied intelligence now spans navigation, household assistance, manipulation, autonomous driving, aerial agents, and multimodal large-model control. This expansion has made benchmark construction a central bottleneck for reliable evaluation. Unlike static datasets, embodied benchmarks combine task specifications, environments, robot data, demonstrations, annotations, metrics, evaluation scripts, and release policies into a single evaluation system. This survey reviews the literature through a five-stage construction pipeline: requirement and task construction, data acquisition, data cleaning and annotation, benchmark suite generation and metric definition, and evaluation execution with diagnostic feedback. For each stage, the survey analyzes the transition from manual curation to traditional automation, foundation-model assistance, and agentic closed-loop workflows. It also compares qualitative construction costs across human labor, data and asset acquisition, compute and simulation, validation and debugging, governance and maintenance, and rework risk. The main conclusion is that automation does not simply reduce benchmark cost. Instead, it often shifts cost toward validation, auditability, version control, and long-term governance. Progress in embodied evaluation will therefore depend not only on larger benchmark suites, but also on construction pipelines that are diagnosable, auditable, and responsibly refreshable.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Improving Variational Counterdiabatic Driving with Weighted Actions and Computer Algebra

arXiv:2505.18367v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Variational counterdiabatic (CD) driving is a disciplined and widely used method to robustly control quantum many-body systems by mimicking adiabatic processes with high fidelity and reduced duration. Central to this technique is a universal structure of the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) over a parameterized Hamiltonian. Here, we reveal that introducing a new degree of freedom into the theory of the AGP can significantly improve variational CD driving. Specifically, we find that the algebraic characterization of the AGP is not unique, and we exploit this nonuniqueness to develop the weighted variational method for deriving a refined driving protocol. This approach extends the conventional method in two aspects: it assigns customized weights to matrix elements relevant to specific problems, and it effectively incorporates nonlocal information into local driving coefficients. We also develop an efficient numerical algorithm to compute the refined driving protocol using computer algebra. Our framework is broadly applicable and, in principle, it can replace any previous use of variational CD driving. We demonstrate its practicality by applying it to adiabatic evolution along the ground state of a parameterized Hamiltonian. This proposal outperforms the conventional method in terms of fidelity, as confirmed by extensive numerical simulations on quantum Ising models.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Federated continual learning: A comprehensive survey on lifelong and privacy-preserving learning over distributed and non-stationary data

arXiv:2606.11272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative and privacy-preserving model training across distributed clients, but most existing FL systems implicitly assume data stationarity. In real-world settings-such as healthcare, industrial IoT (IIOT), cybersecurity, and smart cities-data streams are inherently non-stationary, leading classical FL methods to suffer from performance degradation, instability, and catastrophic forgetting. Continual Learning (CL) addresses learning under evolving data distributions but has been largely studied in centralized settings, overlooking key constraints of federated systems, including privacy, limited communication, and client heterogeneity. Federated Continual Learning (FCL) emerges at the intersection of FL and CL, aiming to support lifelong, adaptive, and privacy-aware learning over distributed and non-stationary data. This survey provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of FCL. We first present a formal definition of the FCL problem and clarify its distinctive characteristics. We then analyze the limitations of classical FL under non-stationary conditions, highlighting how CL principles support long-term adaptation. To organize the rapidly growing literature, we propose a multi-dimensional taxonomy of FCL approaches. Furthermore, we review representative application domains and data modalities, summarize commonly used evaluation metrics, and discuss experimental perspectives for assessing long-term performance and forgetting. Finally, we highlight key open challenges, including handling extreme heterogeneity under temporal drift, designing scalable and privacy-preserving memory mechanisms, and establishing standardized benchmarks. This survey aims to serve as a reference and a roadmap for advancing FCL toward robust and deployable real-world systems.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Changes in hierarchical brain dynamics of rumination following mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability worldwide with risk of onset and recurrence linked to depressive ruminative thought patterns. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is an evidence-based treatment for depression that targets the ability to recognise, decenter, and disengage from ruminative thought patterns. Elucidating how MBCT impacts hierarchical brain organisation may be key to understanding the processes by which MBCT can modulate ruminative tendencies. In a randomised controlled functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) trial on individuals with MDD (N=80) before and after MBCT in addition to treatment as usual (TAU), we investigated changes in hierarchical brain organisation during resting-state and rumination. We built whole-brain models to obtain generative connectivity (GEC) matrices per patient and quantified brain hierarchy by measuring the global directedness and regional trophic levels in each GEC, in which greater directedness reflects more directional information flow and less recurrence. Global directedness in MBCT+TAU compared to TAU increased during rumination, with no changes during resting-state. Furthermore, increased regional breadth of hierarchy during rumination was related to improvements in clinical and behavioural outcomes following MBCT+TAU. Increased brain hierarchy during rumination following mindfulness training may be consistent with a shift away from self-reinforcing negative mental loops towards more differentiated and less coupled cognitive and bodily cycles, supporting MBCT's ability to interrupt ruminative processes. Hierarchical brain dynamics may hold promise as a treatment-sensitive marker and a potential mechanism of therapeutic change in MBCT for depression.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Contextual Invertible World Models: A Neuro-Symbolic Agentic Framework for Colorectal Cancer Drug Response

arXiv:2603.02274v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Precision oncology is currently limited by the small-N, large-P paradox, where high-dimensional genomic data is abundant but pharmacological response samples are sparse. While deep learning achieves predictive accuracy, it frequently fails to provide the mechanistic clarity required for clinical adoption. We present the Contextual Invertible World Model (CIWM), a Neuro-Symbolic Agentic Framework that bridges this gap by integrating a quantitative machine learning emulator with a Large Language Model reasoning layer. Utilising a stringently curated, high-fidelity data engineering pipeline on the Sanger GDSC dataset (\( N=83 \)), we isolate true biological signals from in vitro artifacts to establish a rigorous baseline predictive correlation for complex transcriptomics (\( r=0.268 \)). Through Inverse Reasoning, we perform in silico CRISPR perturbations across the colorectal landscape. The framework autonomously overturns classical mechanistic assumptions, identifying a hierarchical dominance of mutant KRAS over the APC/Wnt-axis in driving 5-fluorouracil resistance (\( \Delta=-0.0469 \)) via a "KRAS Shield" mapped to MAPK/PI3K networks. Furthermore, the agentic layer identified a "PIK3CA Paradox", revealing that repairing PIK3CA inadvertently increases chemoresistance (\( \Delta=+0.0085 \)) by triggering a compensatory feedback loop that hyperactivates the dominant MAPK survival pathway.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Spatial Priors via Space Filling Curves for Small and Limited Data Vision Transformers

Though Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become the dominant backbone in many computer vision tasks, due to permutation equivariance, their attention mechanism lacks explicit spatial inductive biases. This become particularly important in two settings: when model capacity is small or training data is limited. Inspired by the attention masking strategies in Linear Transformers and the scanning patterns of Vision SSMs, we introduce VIOLIN, a lightweight masked attention mechanism that encodes spatial structure within attention via Space Filling Curves (SFCs) with less than 0.0015% extra parameters and negligible computational overhead. VIOLIN scans the image using multiple SFCs to construct curve-specific decay masks, which are then combined and multiplied with the attention matrix. Across a wide range of evaluations, VIOLIN consistently improves performance. In limited data regimes such as fine-tuning on VTAB-1K, it boosts accuracy across all task groups and by up to 8.7% on the tasks where spatial information is essential. It can be combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA to further increase the performance. Beyond fine-tuning, VIOLIN improves various small scale ViT architectures (e.g., DeiT, DINO) during pretraining on ImageNet-1K. Additionally, on pixel-level CIFAR-100 training, a task that is highly dependent on location information, VIOLIN increases accuracy by up to 7.2%. Overall, VIOLIN provides a computationally efficient yet effective way to inject spatial inductive bias into ViTs, especially benefiting small models and limited data settings.